Spending money on games

An interesting topic I saw going round: How much to spend for games? Paeroka wrote about it, Naithin did, and Krikket started it.

I’ve been summing up my gaming expenses in the end of year posts since 2014, that post isn’t due for 2 months but the current state for me seems to be that I have allowed myself to pay 3 MMO subscriptions at the same time, maybe for the first time ever. I can justify that because I don’t think I bought any game this year, with the exception of FFXIV’s Shadowbringers expansion, if you want to count that. I resisted any sale and I’ve been busy enough to not be lured in by any new release of any games coming out this year. The only things on my current “I really want to play that” list is Horizon: Zero Dawn and Beat Saber (and I’m certainly not buying a PS4 or VR gear for those). Also the Switch sounds nice, but I suppose I should play all my XBox 360 games first before buying another console.

Compared to the others I linked above my number of games is ridiculously low, and I still played only half of them, but I think I can also pull the bundle excuse – for example the complete idSoftware-Pack. I did play those games, before I bought the bundle, even have some of the CDs somewhere. And I have zero regrets for that purchase, as an example.

So the final tally is still out and I’m too lazy to do the math now, but I guess I’ll come up with the same ballpark as every year, roughly 30 EUR per month for games, which is 1 EUR per day – quite cheap for a hobby that takes up a major part of my spare time.

And yes, overall I feel quite bad to always just buy games on sale and only support MMOs that seem to do well anyway, but I don’t really see why I should hand out money for games I’m simply not really interested in playing. Sometimes I get the urge, but nothing but MMOs seems to really stick in the last years. There simply wasn’t a major release that has me pumped and excited in a way where I could reasonably guess I’d even spend 20 hours on a full price game for 60 EUR. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 is the first one in years. Maybe.

And in conclusion, maybe I should look up my /played times of various MMOs, that would certainly justify being subscribed there. Marvel Heroes said just shy of 65 days, that’s 1554 hours.